MTV NEWSWOMAN HAS A RICH BACKGROUND

Serena Altschul grew up on Fifth Avenue with four older siblings who went as expected to Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Barnard.

Her great-uncle was New York Gov. Herbert Lehman. Her great-grandmother, Hattie Lehman Goodhart, is in the first sentence of Our Crowd, Stephen Birmingham's chronicle of New York's German-Jewish aristocracy, as an arbiter of people one visited, and people one didn't.

Her father, Arthur Altschul, briefly covered the United Nations for The New York Times in the late 1940s, then fed the Altschul fortunes for a half-century on Wall Street. Her mother, Siri von Reis, is a Harvard-educated ethnobotanist, half-Finnish and half-Swedish, who is now a full-time poet.

Such a catalog of Altschul's pedigree makes her miserable - she wants to be judged on her own - but shows how far this heiress a la mode has wandered outside the family privet hedge.

At 27, Altschul is on her way as the new face of news at MTV, which created another recent newswoman, Tabitha Soren, now on leave for a Stanford University fellowship. Altschul appears to be the same kind of ambitious pro as Soren, and has not been idle in her absence.

Altschul is an anchor of MTV's hourly news updates and host of the program MTV News Unfiltered. Today she takes a big step forward as co-producer and host of a half-hour program, Fatal Dose, about heroin abuse among suburban youth. Airing at 10 p.m., it is the premiere of True Life, an MTV weekly documentary series and another of the network's growing number of news programs aimed at 18- to 24-year-olds.

Altschul's superiors say the trust she inspires in her age group is crucial - especially with the group she interviews in Fatal Dose. "Imagine if Diane Sawyer tried to walk in there," said David Sirulnick, the executive vice president of MTV News. Altschul, in contrast, appears to be the anchor of choice among high school kids in Plano, Texas. "She looks like them, she acts like them, she talks like them," Sirulnick said.

Well, up to a point. She is, in fact, such an exotic, athletic and turn-the-heads blonde that her main concern seems to be that she be taken seriously.

"I don't think I'll ever forget watching these young adults do that to themselves," she said. "They wanted to show this audience the horrors of it [taking drugs). This wasn't a fun day out."

Altschul appears on MTV News at 10 minutes to the hour. Her mother the poet now has to watch TV for the first time in her life.

"Waiting for Serena to come on I've even gotten into the Mighty Mighty Bosstones," von Reis said.